"Homer's Poem" by Al Purdy

This is quite possibly the best look into poetic processes I've yet seen: or, at least, the deepest kindest (most affectionate) acknowledgement of the source of true writing in general. It's to Homer every poet must light his fires.
_______

Homer's Poem
(There's only a hyphen between me and death)

Listen
- we are about to be born
we are soon to become alive
and fear is always alive
when death is near
Listen
- sounds outside the womb
outside are living sounds
of things alive
and they have names
and say their names aloud
but I remember
I have no name
I cannot remember my own name
Listen
to the name of fear
animal fear
for cattle are being slaughtered
it is a great feast day
and there is loud rejoicing
the sounds come to me
as from a far away river
a thunder among the mountains
Listen
I say to him
my brother beside me
waiting as I am waiting
Listen
I say to him
let us stay here
let us not be born
I am afraid of being born
and then whisper to myself
did I say those words
did I say that I was afraid?
-it was only a fever of darkness
only a shred of a dream
Listen
they are making ready the feast-day
there is excitement in their voices
they are celebrating
and the sizzle of cooking meat
comes to me
like the hissing syllables
of words I do not yet know
and saliva in my mouth
is flooding my name
- my name?
what is my name?
but I am not yet born
I have no name
tell me I say to myself
what is my name?
Listen
but there is nothing to hear
there is nothing outside
and we shall be born
into a world of nothing
a world in which there is
nothing to believe in
nothing to hold to
and I think if there was a choice
I would not be born
but there is no choice
Listen
I have remembered my name
and say it to those others
the others around me
who are also about to be born
although not into life
they are being born into death
I say my name to them
my name is Odysseus
in the city of life
which is the city of death
- my name that you may remember
my name is Odysseus
                                 (from The Collected Poems)

"Unoriginal genius": a plagiarism for our times

Too many people mistake a photograph for a work of art, a plagiarism for an audacity, a parody for a laugh, or worse yet, a miserable stroke of inspiration for a creation (Gilles Deleuze)

I've accused the avant-garde of unoriginality,and even of outright theft, often enough. See here and here for the details. The avant-garde is supposed to be quintessentially nonmainstream writing (in the sense of a new artistic era that's superseded modernism) but that distinction's collapsed in the age of globalization  When late-capitalist forces have engulfed everything from global finances to revolution to environmental activism, cultural producers must stop thinking they enjoy any special outsider status. There's really nothing for experimental poetries to be 'outside' of in the new age of Empire (Negri & Hardt). As a result, avant-gardists have resorted to a style of work characterized by repetitiveness and appropriation of old techniques, parroting the past almost to the point of becoming practically indistinguishable from advertising & commercialized art.

Either outright contempt or condescension has usually been the reply to the accusation of unoriginality. In the minds of its staunchest defenders (like Ron Silliman) the critics are philistines who are not worth the bother, to be curtly dismissed; it's been, after all, a year since Silliman's shut off the comments stream altogether at his blog. But I see now why the experimentalists have been so reluctant to fight in the first place or why rather there's now nothing really to fight over.The unthinkable has finally happened: what was once just speculative daring has turned into acceptable practice sanctioned by 'writing class' academics like Marjorie Perloff & Kenneth Goldsmith. Plagiarism, perhaps the last vestige of quality control left in the academic world, is now being touted as legitimate writing practice.  In fact, Goldsmith teaches a course entitled "Uncreative Writing" in which students "are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing." A final grade is even awarded for successfully defending a paper they've stolen from an online source.

Wholesale stealing from past or contemporary authors, now termed by Goldsmith "repurposing", has become acceptable practice. A plagiarism for our times. Claims to creativity are no longer to be granted on the basis of original & insightful writing—an ideal dismissed by Goldsmith as "trite, overused and ill-defined". Outright filching through any means available is considered the standard. Cutting/pasting, appropriation, recycling and intentional plagiarism are among the most "vital and exciting" new means of significant artistic production. The author of Traffic (2007), a transcription of twenty-four hours of traffic reports from a New York radio station, positively gushes (as you'd expect) over this new "patchwriting" manifesto:

Far from this "uncreative" literature being a nihilistic, begrudging acceptance—or even an outright rejection—of a presumed "technological enslavement," it is a writing imbued with celebration, ablaze with enthusiasm for the future, embracing this moment as one pregnant with possibility. This joy is evident in the writing itself, in which there are moments of unanticipated beauty—some grammatical, others structural, many philosophical: the wonderful rhythms of repetition, the spectacle of the mundane reframed as literature, a reorientation to the poetics of time, and fresh perspectives on readerliness, to name just a few. And then there's emotion: yes, emotion. But far from being coercive or persuasive, this writing delivers emotion obliquely and unpredictably, with sentiments expressed as a result of the writing process rather than by authorial intention.

Poetry that comes "with dashes of inauthenticity, falseness, and unoriginality thrown in" is to be seen as the product of a type of "writing machine" (or poet, if you're old school) wedded to choices of code, programming and replication style. A purely processual poetics contemporaneous with digital technology and the Web is what's going to bury the modernists or, at the least, make them look amusingly antiquated.

Well, the critic has been silenced at last but not through any powers of persuasion. It seems my worst fears have come true. Poetry, the poet & the means of artistic production have become appropriated by late-capitalist forces of globalization. Goldsmith, who once worked in advertising & can personally attest to the marketability of "creativity", a fact that makes the notion of "creativity" a sham to begin with, couldn't be a better harbinger for the complete assimilation of experimental poetries to the self-enslaving circuits & drives of Internet technology and, stemming from it, of the media literacies ( via the much vaunted "mechanistic processes") that spawn an almost infinite cache of 'texts' to be thieved at will. It's ironic Goldsmith, the self-styled liberator of poetic energies, should actually point the way towards viewing the digital as an exploitive medium sans pareil, & get abjectly caught in his own Web.

I'd argue that the recent plagiarism manifesto is a natural consequence of not just capitalist forces: to a very great extent Language theory itself, with its wilful particling of speech and language and celebration of indeterminacy, is just as responsible. Poetic language has been diced up and served as expendable digital parts. Goldsmith's talk about the need to "hoard" text in this Web free-for-all, envisaging a work "pregnant with possibility",conjures up images of looting. It's a sort of riot mind-set in which the pillaging follows destruction of the stores. Frederic Jameson in an early essay ("Postmodernism and Consumer Society") once prophesied that late capitalism would be known by just such a fragmentation and loss of memory ("historical amnesia"), and the Language disciples (Perloff, Goldsmith) were quick to feed on the carcass. The desired effect of this total globalization & theory closure is to make the reader-consumer as forgetful of the literary past s/he comes from as last year's Spring fashions.

Souster versus the Toronto Research Group: or the rise of the "altermodern"

...WHAT HAS BEEN CONSTANT TILL NOW HAVE BEEN THE ARTIFICIAL BOUNDARIES WE HAVE PLACED ON THE POEM. WE HAVE PLACED THE POEM BEYOND OURSELVES BY PUTTING ARTIFICIAL BOUNDARIES BETWEEN OURSELVES & THE POEM. WE MUST PUT THE POEM IN OUR LIVES (bpNichol cited in Peter Jaeger's ABC of Reading: TRG)

Another thin book of verse
about to be hopefully dropped
into that inviting, wide-mouthed well
which we're only now beginning to suspect

is bottomless...(from "With a Wandering Net")

Raymond Souster never warred openly (as far as I know) with poststructuralism, theory and theorists, but he could very well have. I can't think of any debate that would have done more to clarify the state of Canadian writing today. But then again, if Souster, considered a dyed-in-the-wool modernist, had encountered the poststructuralists, at least in terms of the reflections on the poem, the reader & the nature of the book as recorded by bpNichol and Steve McCaffery in the now celebrated Toronto Research Group (TRG), the reader might've expected Souster to come up sadly short. It might have been a disaster for any appreciation of Souster's legacy as Canada's greatest humanist poet.

Souster's humanism is, however, not an ideal to be discarded (as so much cultural baggage) in the face of the postmodernist. The lyricist's wonderfully illustrative eye may seem sometimes stale and even a bit sentimental at places, an unassumingly keen-edged poetry always liable to be blunted by outmoded deference to notions of nation, nature & literary tradition. Through the filter of about thirty years' worth of textual criticism anything's bound to look quaintly dated. Souster's work, of course, isn't actually stale or even irrelevant to the reader grounded in post-TISH:  the modernists, read against the findings of the TRG,will seem more a living work than reliquary. Incidentally, Souster's aware of the ideological divide that separates him from the younger upstarts. The Charles Olson reference in Souster's poem "Super Crow" (from Running out the Clock in Collected Poems of Raymond Souster. Volume Eight 1991 - 1993, Oberon), for instance, is certainly witness to the American influence in Canada's only significant experimentalist period, & though conversing and conversant with Olson *he can barely conceal his own disgust: not just to the Olson "Super Crow" but all the Duncan and Creeley crows invading his backyard Souster's challenge is unequivocal: "shape up or ship out" (48).

I believe a comparison of two very different literary discourses shows, if anything, that examining Souster through the eyes of Nichol & McCaffery may reveal a modernism never seen before. Or at least disclose 'traces' of a more distinctive Canadian writing that was never allowed to develop, stilled by the American invasion at 60s Simon Fraser. In this sense TRG's become almost exemplary in the way Atwood's only real significant work, Survival, has been for feminist & traditionalist readers: not the slayer but preserver of literary uniqueness detectable across many styles. TRG—what is perhaps its greatest strength—is not just a chronicle of an imported poststructuralist revolution; in the hands of capable literary avant-gardists, TRG theory may makeSouster into a more appreciatively read & understood author. And any vital modernist redux must come primarily through an examination of language.

Or rather the language of poetry research. By research the TRG means an active inquiry into the causes and conditions of writing. In the "Manifesto" chapter of Peter Jaeger's ABC of Reading: TRG, McCaffery states "the TRG research assumes an intertextual and (re)productive engagement with outmoded forms" (73), a symbiotic relationship between text & tradition, writing & the life of the writer. Pound's "make it new" banner can now be proudly waved on Canadian shores. But, of course, the modernist poet (reader) may have to make a few conceptual readjustments in line with poststructuralist theory in order to make Souster 'new'. S/he's faced, in fact, with some rather daunting challenges. Among the most radical recommendations offered by TRG (and I'll cite only the most interesting) are to change the book into a "book-machine", such as McCaffery's "panel" and Nichol's "boxed shuffle" texts,  something so manipulable the reader can't tell the real from the used (16); reverse the reader's role from that of consumer to active meaning-maker (40); make language radically "concrete" (24) (i.e. by investing more in letters, visuals & sounds on the page than text); upset the balance between language and reality through recognition of absence or the "blank space" lying at the centre of every poem (51); and effect the most radical break between text and speech (80-82).

Souster's already made some of these accommodations—without any indebtedness to the TRG I'm aware of—and to that extent the researchers have made Souster a more accessible CanLit poet. But a modernism in line with poststructuralist researches is to be read differently, even given a entirely new name. Taking key terminology from Hardt and Negri's Commonwealth, I'm inclined to drop "resistance" as a reading strategy altogether, & mark the difference between Souster and his experimentalist contemporaries as rather a "diagonal line that escapes the confining play of opposites" (102), something McCaffery & Nichol cannot seem to do. In fact, to call it "altermodern" (after Hardt and Negri) is really a way for critics to resist locating Souster in any notions of "identity" and "tradition", & argue for a type of  writing adaptable to a world of ordinary (& accessible) experiences. Where researchers McCaffery & Nichol cannot, ironically enough, break free from theory, Souster's poetry now can sweep gracefully past all the academic-poet's objections since he's, in a very real way, co-opted them. A few examples will suffice.

Intertextuality ("embedding" in TRG lingo) is, to begin with, a defining quality of Souster's poetry, too, & the man and work can encounter "outmoded forms" with the best of them. In his writings 'outmoded', however, can simply mean a variation on a recognizable theme rather than a discarded style. Prose verse, as in "The First Day of Falling" (52), for example, lets a purposely undefined prose/poetry distinction loose on Souster's charmed readers, his early fall description good for startling revelation or just purposeless fun with the usual literary stock in trade, a source of creative 'misreadings':

Even before the first day of falling the leaves on these street-side trees have worked themselves into such a nervous state that you swear you can hear them trembling on their branches far into the night. It's mostly because there's so much loose talk about the hazards of their terrible journey to the ground below. (52)

The aging veteran in "The Last Gunner down the Arras Road" (51) tries desperately to shore up a broken war narrative turning over in his Alzheimer's, himself a figure of history lost in the shades, the unsettling ephemera of memory and diseased tissue "where not one single puff/of dust is ever raised/by ghostly gun-limbers jolting past." (51). Here is the tragic dance of lack and desire much discussed in Lacanian theory. "Caird's Confectionery" (36) is also a prickly memory—an always deceitfully pleasant (sham) childhood rêve— that reveals its own startling "blank space" at the poem's end: "the sign CAIRD'S CONFECTIONERY/Candies, Soda Fountain, Light Lunches/no longer swings with the breeze" (4). And between a postage stamp image re-discovered in 1993 and the sinking of the real SS Cariboo by German submarine U-69 in 1943 as recounted in Souster's "Pictures from a Long-Lost World: SS Cariboo, Lost at Sea, October 13, 1943" (65) lie a store of personal reminiscences, dialogue & intimations with the look itself of a "concrete" text haplessly arranged on the page.

Souster's lives, works & literary creations, in other words, subserve an intertextuality that passes through a series of nonadjacent life-worlds: doing it almost nonchalantly, certainly without the intermediaries of 'theory', always reckoning on the fellowship of spring-worms (82), squirrel (95), & knife-sharpeners (171), & never ever compelled (because he doesn't have) to try for the brash textual distortions of his post-TISH contemporaries. Rhythm, elegant phrasal clustering and accessible senses are always at the ready so that the commonplaces of life in Toronto become quite extraordinary. I'll cite "Morning Voices" (113) as a bravura piece (reminiscent of Leopardi) written for a "single bird-voice" that's also full echo to the discord outside the poet's window:

This single bird-voice
that seems right outside my window,
has me fully awake now,
listening with every sense I can muster
as he appears to be trading notes
with a bird-duet somewhere in the distance
of the morning, still half-awake;

picking up their echo,
then sending right back
a more perfect one of his own,
so that a moment later when the siren
on a Jane Street police-cruiser starts to wail
like a banshee's daughter, I hear this intrusion
as a third voice only, which, being a man's,
is definitely minor-league,

so that after three or four outbursts
my ear discards it, instead picking up again
the echo, answer, echo, answer
of my first two perfect dawn-raisers.

Here's 'symbiosis', a real concrete sound investment in the lyrical text & acknowledgement also of the "blank space" where harmony manages to live in the chaos of life on Jane Street. Here's a living instance of bpNichol's injunction to "put the poem in our lives".

Of course, the 'altermodern' is applicable to poems of Souster's own distinct making, such as the historical pieces in the "Pictures from a Long-Lost World" series: "John Smith, Poet Laureate of Toronto," (21), "SS Cariboo, Lost at Sea, October 13, 1943" (65), "Airmen on Short-Arm Inspection, Moncton, 1945" (73), "Acting Bombardier on Paris Leave, November 1918" (108), and "Sergeant Macdougall of the York Volunteers, Fenian Raids, 1866" (148). Nothing in TRG can account for their mildly odd (almost anti-narrative) style,

This city's one and only Poet Laureate
(who could imagine a second?).

And today no-one even knows for certain
the year of his birth (either 1792 or '93),
or in what part of Ontario he was born,
though he worked on a farm until his early twenties (21)

one that turns regimental honour and duty into their satirico-comical other,

"It was all I could do
to keep from laughing out loud,
especially when the MO
started down our line of airmen
with battledress trousers dropped
right to the floor, so we stood
in our issue boxer shorts
awaiting his medical pleasure." (73)

has fun with the notion of Canadian identity,

"Ill never forget the rest of that leave

in old Paree, even though I was dead broke two days later—
there wasn't much the Parisiennes wouldn't do for us,
six-day bike-races at the Veldôme, Maurice Chevalier himself,
even then a big star in Paris, taking us to a boxing show
at a private sports club, champagne at the Folies Bergère—
you name it, we did, everything on the house,
for the crazy Canadians, even crazier Australians
and beer-happy Tommies". (112)

 & creates a generally self-inflating text that ends up reducing the language of patriotism to adolescent speech.

"What no-one knew then, or if they did,
didn't want to tell us, was that the men we were to face
(all Irish-Americans, hating everything British to a man),
were for the most part old soldiers,
seasoned Yankee veterans of the Civil War...

Looking back on it now, it's a good thing we didn't know
what lay ahead of us; not that we would have been dismayed
or showed alarm; but it would have completely spoiled
our little holiday excursion to the Falls,
made all our loud, ceaseless chatter,
our boyish whoops ring slightly hollow." 149)

 The diagonal falls across three world-events, & the result is that at least three generations of soldier-citizens & three intersecting segments of the war memoir, far from keeping the story straight, like to dissociate themselves from confining tradition & any privileging of event over poetic language. It's a concession to textuality very much after the heart of the TRG theorist, or even to the way 'series' suggests a deferral of a standard war narrative ("referential stability" in TG-speak) that's told once and then closed.

* I'd like to thank my friend poet Ed Baker for the "Black Mountain North Symposium" link.

John Coburn and the "Healing Hearts" project: or true Canadian art

John Coburn is an artist from Toronto, Ontario (Canada) who published a book of art in 2002 entitled Healing Hearts: a series of 43 pen and ink drawings made by Coburn in the months and years following the terrorist attacks in New York. In 2003 Coburn printed 3,000 copies to be donated to the families of 9/11. An art exhibition (curated by Toronto-based Beckett Fine Art) is to be given in Manhattan from September 1 to 15 at 14 Wall Street, at a site near Ground Zero. In fact, Coburn's work will form the basis of both art exhibition and an upcoming documentary film directed by Paul Perrier.

What is particularly remarkable to me is that his book would not have been printed, published and distributed were it not for the generosity of private corporate & artistic donors. His Healing Hearts Art Exhibition wouldn't be possible without the support of Fairfax Financial Holdings in Toronto and Sciame Construction in Toronto. Both art exhibition and documentary are being executive produced by film company owners Tom Powers of Open Door Co. in Toronto and Gordon Smeaton in New York.

Here is indie arts production more to my liking. Here is a people's art moulded by artistic vision and supported by donors, friends and sponsors who are willing to invest in significant cultural expression. What a refreshing change from the usual fatuous 'academic' arts funding such as the recent $60,000 "Research/Creation in the Fine Arts" grant awarded to Brock associate-professor Adam Dickinson in order "to write poetry about the impact of environmental chemicals and other invaders on his body". All of the estimated tens of thousands of grants applications made yearly to government funding agencies will never, in my view, surpass a single Healing Hearts success.

Well done, Mr. Coburn! I celebrate you the man, artist and cultural entrepreneur.

Colin Morton's "The Cabbage of Paradise": and how to tell good Dada from bad

Colin Morton

Twenty years on, destruction and creation continue their dervish dance, and another generation is making some of the same discoveries again, "making it new" in part by recovering territory that has been lost and built over many times before. (from the "Afterword")

WE MUST PUT THE POEM IN OUR LIVES...(bpNichol)

I've accused experimental poets (poetries) of being prone to 'mimeticism', and with good reason. There's no way really for the creative imagination in the avant-garde to work except by looking to models & manifestos of almost a century ago. It's one of the criticisms against them I've made recently in regards to Ron Silliman and Christian Bök. On the other hand, I've also seen in the Internet collage work of Clifford Duffy a creative adaptation of conceptual deleuzianism more closely aligned to the anti-bourgeois spirit of the first language experimentalists, a virulently anti-Art & anti-tradition impulse that separates him from the more fashionable (mostly academic) 'appropriation' art industry of our day. Almost by virtue of that alone, Duffy is the sole member of the class of significant (even traditional) avant-gardism in Canada.

Duffy is also a thoroughgoing 'digital collagist'. But he's not the only Dadaist in town and nor can he claim to be the only poet with what amounts to be an almost lifelong commitment to the artistic vision of a single person.There's the curious case of Canadian poet Colin Morton and literary mentor Kurt Schwitters, & the work The Cabbage of Paradise: The Merzbook and Other Poems (Merzbook) based on the life and times of the great early twentieth-century German collagist, poet and painter. As it was perhaps Morton's intention to do, Merzbook tries be read as a piece of Dadaist invention itself, collage & concrete poetry & anecdotal materials almost evenly interspersed throughout the book's 92 pages. Since the work's advertised in the "Note on the Text" as a "poetic dramatization of scenes from the life of 20th century German artist Kurt Schwitters", it's perhaps more properly a literary biography.

But where do you draw the line between biography & art? Or is there even one to begin with, visible enough to tell the poet from his source, art from imitation? There are times when I can't tell the good from the purely 'imitative' (bad) Dada: destruction from creation (to use some of Morton's own terminology). Artist and model are so wrapped in each other's arms—I have a Honecker-Brezhnev kissing image in my mind— the reader faces a complete self-opposition of the text. A dissenting opinion can even seem out of place here since the reader is too bounded by the Schwitters tradition. In "Critic" (a poem adapted from Schwitters) the critics are made into the usual 'strawman', caricatured as sheepish, witless & just too qualified for their own good: all they're fit to do is destroy the very creativity they find lacking in themselves. "The difference between artist and critic is this:/the artist creates, the critic bleates."(44) But without some concession to ironic or playful distancing from Schwitters legend, a line like this amounts to just moralizing & embarrassing cliche. Surely, the experimentalist Morton must see that.

Or can he? The poet cannot create here anymore than Schwitters can pose for Morton's portrait. Poetry & reader reside in some shadowy ill-conceived outline for a project, torn between the work as narrative and poetry.The least Merzbook can do is to have some fun with the 'linearity' of narrative verse, but it doesn't, following a fairly predictable syllabus of origins, struggles and the subsequent vindications of the misprized artist. Language is subservient to biographical accuracy & consequently betrays the very complexity of 'assemblage' technique & the predominantly virulent anti-Art impetus of the man himself, with the result that we get a predictable textbook figure easily accessible & assimilable. A Schwitters for undergraduates. Here's the usual literary apprenticeship beginning with a child's formative Wordsworthian first impressions, and leading to abandonment of lyricism & all cultural authority.

When I was born, Picasso
had not yet entered his blue period
—I cried

As soon as I could stand
I stood under Picasso's influence
I pointed to the arch where
the road passes over the canal
and "Tom" I said, or "happening"

My lyric period was when I lived in Violet Street
—I never saw a violet
That was owing to Matisse
whose palette then was always red (from "Influence")

Delicate Mondrian and surrealist scraps & things found in a boy's garden and "Violet Street" will, of course, contrast strongly in this poem, & throughout the entire text, with harmful literary influences and the violence of "boys I ran with" who "tore up root and branch". The enemies of Art and the man have been scoped out early and given a name: traditional lyricism, contemporary bourgeois art, the Nazis. The child-poet's never to stop looking for the lost garden.

Morton's work is at its most genuine only as a chronicle of the struggles of a literary movement in its infancy but that's a sense of strength nourished by my own sympathies for the traditional avant-garde. Particularly endearing to me is the account of Schwitters' devotion to Merz as artistic principle—"The will toward a new style" ("Hollandada",33)—even through the most terrible periods in his life: forced exile, personal ridicule, alienation from family and home. Schwitters' rejection by Richard Huelsenbeck, the founder of Berlin Dada, was the least of his troubles. He could easily dismiss the fake "Huelsendadas" of the art world, "husks of artists/after the kernel's winnowed out" ("Huelsendada", 29) but that, of course, was nothing compared to life in Nazi Germany ("Death Row: Cell 43"), the nation's "war/on abstract art" ("Great Moments in Modern Art", 63) and growing separation from wife and Hanover Merzbau and imprisonment in Scotland. His Dada contra mundum optimism was bound to give way to the growing shadows (as recorded in "How My Life Has Changed"):

Always I have gone on painting
as condemned men the night before the gallows
play poker in their cells.
At last I even had a show
at Jack Bilbo's, the art gangsgter's gallery
- nothing sold. And at the opening
I received a telegram - Helma was dead
and my Hanover home struck by bombs.
Helma, my best friend for life
along with my life's work, both gone (75)

But, of course, after all this it's metaphor more than reality of art that prevails at the end of Morton's account. To vindicate Schwitters against the personal attacks & confirm his place in literary history, he's had to lay out the cut-ups of Dada art (in the manner of Tzara's "simultaneous poem") and then reassemble them into an enduring Schwitters whole, as if the collage is alone the message.In the "Afterword" Morton speaks of "another generation [that's] making some of the same discoveries again". At Sheveningen beach with the van Doesburgs he exclaims the waves "are dada!" (34); his home at Number 5 Waldhausenstrasse (39) is a veritable scene of  dada euphoria"; he even stands "elbow deep in the market's fierce poetry" (51) among the discarded proofs at the Molling factory. The Merz principle with its refrain of "Any rags, any bones, any bottles today" ("Enemy Alien", 71), sung like the antiphony throughout his entire life, is lauded as a real legacy-maker.

Perhaps if I were Kurt
I would have given up—quickly aging
in the bombed out streets of London,
unable to go home for fear;
hearing months after of how his wife died,
how allied bombs struck his Hannover home
making rubble of his column and all
the beloved work of thirty year
—all Hitler hadn't already burned.

But inside, Kurt never grew old.
In the bleakest post war days
when foul German crimes
turned up in the ashes
he was starting over: a new love,
a new home in the mountains,
plans to rebuild the Merzbau, to print
a new magazine—right up to the end
Kurt was beginning— ("Hausmann Remembers", 88-89)

The son's own riposte in "Ernst Replies" (90) says pretty much the same thing, true to pretty much the same overarching metaphor. (The concluding "column of light" image suggests even the "heliocentric" metaphor that Derrida famously says is a sign of suspicious essentialist discourses.) Schwitters' life doesn't end (as it very well could have) with the desperate tone of Antonin Artaud, the dramatist driven to madness and disdain of the world at the same time. Schwitters' is not the aberrant vision of fame in which followers are pigs "who eat too much" and the writer a permanently broken 'schizo' figure who cannot eat at the same table "without spitting" (Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings,585). Of course, Schwitters is not Artaud, temperamentally & stylistically very different, but the life trajectories of the suffering artists do seem the same everywhere. Morton had every right to make the Schwitters story an open signifier, situating his poetic energies more in the textual than biographical with plenty of room for what Dom Sylvester Houédard called "borderblur".

Schwitters by temperament and practice would have warred instinctively against Morton's Merzbook, and not least because it records none of the more accidental (and more interestingly twisting) interweaves in Dada & life. Meaning, especially poetic meaning, can't lie in one official homogenous narrative. In fact, Morton never really advances beyond the opening Wordsworthian romanticism of "Influence". The biographer-poet is as strongly tied to hero-worship as the Lake Poet is to the deification of Nature & the noble rustic. When the poet idealizes the broken pathways of real art (of which there are many in Schwitters' life and any one of which had the potential to give a very different account), bad Dada always results.

Poetry, research bodies and more laughable arts funding, again

Adam Dickinson

Arts funding in Canada has taken a turn for the absurd or perhaps just the predictable. Brock University English teacher Adam Dickinson has just received a $60,000 "Research/Creation in the Fine Arts" grant in order "to write poetry about the impact of environmental chemicals and other invaders on his body". As he's routinely tested for the presence of harmful toxins, bacteria & viruses in his own body, such as mercury, lead, West Nile virus, etc., he'll record his own personal observations in verse. His literary investigations will eventually result in a book entitled Anatomic: Semiotic bodies, chemical environments for which an additional "standard research grant" of $13, 568 has been awarded.

Parroting Christian Bök, Dickinson's dubbed his work "a poetry of science". While not as outrageous as the goal to program bacteria to write poetry ( I wonder whether Bök's grant for 'Xenotext' fell under the same "Social Sciences and Humanities" funding rubric ), Anatomic is certainly another example of the fashionable arts and science mergers to be found these days in most Humanities departments. On its own merits the "poetry as science" idea is food for the imagination but as a source of funding it's certainly a intrusion of the arts into areas for which they're laughably unsuited. The language arts instructor as microbiologist seems to be a growing trend out there! Subsidized projects of this wildly implausible kind may be what's fuelling the recent anti-Arts funding sentiment everywhere: just this sense of a joke gone too far.

Now that poetry's to be recorded in DNA for posterity or used to gauge the impact of synthetic chemicals, arts funding can now be justified as "interdisciplinary": and not one but two grants are to be awarded in this case, one each for the work's "science" and "poetry writing" components. Government agencies can say they now distribute monies more equally among competing research proposals & avoid the accusation that they favour only scientific initiatives: a sad concession, of course, to the gross 'capitalization' of education. Again, as interesting (even avant-garde) creation in its own right the "science of poetry" genre will certainly have a long shelf life. Yes, long live creativity attuned to globalized forces!

But in a climate of applications & "literacy by bureaucracy", Dickinson can no more "explore how our bodies are impacted medically and culturally by the world we live in" than any poet or any book of verse. To my mind, it's more of the usual brash brand-labelling of poetic genres meant to attract a lucrative undergraduate market. The public shouldn't have to pay for something that by nature has always remained 'free' & potentially liberating: a lovely "strange manuscript found in a copper cyclinder" to be entrusted always to the gifted few and generously transmitted through a "collective recognition" (Antonio Negri) of poetry's own humanizing power. And the poet ought never to be a research 'body' in this ridiculously self-absorbed sense.

Graffiti haiku from Spain





Graffiti is a rightful appropriation of public spaces (similar in spirit to Schwitters' Merzbilden) that, in my view, can add a degree of artistic beauty to what will be an otherwise dreary cityscape. I recently saw graffiti art in Spain to equal, in energy & individuality, Joan Miró's art logo (such as the one at Barcelona's biggest bank, La Caixa) and public installations: in fact, compared to it even Miró may look bourgeois, perhaps even outdated (ironically, the very criticism he levelled against his rival Picasso). Portuguese street artist Odeith's wall murals are remarkably striking creations, and though his work's found in the slums of Lisbon, they seem as much a part of the urban aesthetics as the ports, cathedrals and glazed facades. This contemporary work by the new masters has the distinctive feel of both art and social protest.

Remarkable as the graffiti sketched and sprayed on walls, city barriers & highway overpasses is, there are also the hundreds of abandoned farm houses strewn along the countryside whose walls have been turned into a living canvas. The arid landscape, rather than being violated in any way, drew a vitality from the colourful lettering and designs that was remarkable to see. The real Prado resides here. Needless to say, the result proved to be particularly inspiring to me.

Despite the language difficulties, I've constructed a series of 'graffiti haiku' comprised of actual graffiti (in italics) and the more readable business adverts given in English & Spanish. Their juxtaposition everywhere was too tempting to overlook. Purists might object to their abject lack of authorial 'vision' as if language as I saw it displayed in a foreign country couldn't be trusted to speak for itself. Nonetheless, it's my hope that the 'break' (kireji) between graffiti and commerce signals a significant contrast between two very different language sets. To capture some of that prevailing 'social protest' mood is a prerequisite to what I've tried to do here.

sonar tzar—

pont du Diable

Olae!—

olae! olae! olae!

Tzar!—

Nitrato de Chile

spore—

prats de rei

Ibex—

torrente del Martí

Crux—

merci, gracias, thank you!

Hank—

la seu d'urgell

Koooors—

abierto dies y noches

Rabia trick—

Mc Auto

Game 1492—

hotel

AKA Topa—

zona de servicios

Poeas suck—

Cars & Cars